One thing that's worrying about CoCs is that many of them seem political in nature and are used as excuses to abuse other members of the community who don't conform to certain opinions. Bryan Lunduke has chronicled a few examples of this occurring and causing destruction of otherwise healthy communities.
Imagine being able to create windows, draw, deal with io devices (keyboard, mouse, controller, etc.) and do OpenGL graphics type work with system calls.
That would allow (practically) any language to trivially create native apps with a GUI, at least trivially compared to today.
In Linux we could eliminate the multitude of complicated display servers and reduce latency in the system (making VR and AR easier to do). Windows has something similar to what I describe, but it's not very good, and has no builtin OpenGL-like system calls.
A standardized set of system calls for graphics, GUI, and IO would allow cross platform native apps to be trivially created. In principle there's no reason why MacOS, Windows, and Linux could not have such system calls added. The biggest problem is those systems have become very bloated from adhering to backwards compatibility.
I think the reason using the browser for desktop UI is because graphics and UI programming is terrible. The computer architecture and operating systems we use today are built on tech that was before graphics existed.
That's why it's trivial to build a terminal app, but god help you if you want to create a window with a button or draw a line. GLEW, GLUT, Qt, OpenGL, and the rest are just kludges to deal with the fact that we're still working with tech from the 70's. Even those kludges are so terrible that companies like Github and Microsoft have resorted to using the browser to make things like Atom and Visual Studio Code.
It can be fixed, but I'm not sure anyone has the fortitude to redesign hardware and operating systems.
I was at a conference once setting up a booth for a company I worked for. We ended up borrowing an electric screwdriver from a booth next door, but had to turn it by hand because only union members were allowed to use electric tools to setup a booth.
Unions may have helped once upon a time, but now they just take money from your compensation to pay union managers who work against a company being efficient (which makes pay even less over time).
Most people consider intellectual property as a given, and believe without questioning that IP promotes innovation. This book examines those types of arguments and makes a case that IP hinders innovation. Relevant considering the recent Oculus case.
Wasn't krihelinator the same guy who was doing revision history on his repositories and making himself the only contributor? (someone please correct me if I'm wrong)
The article is a bit misleading. The minimum wage is $11/hr. in Seattle and will reach $15 for large businesses by next year, and by 2021 for small businesses.
Amazon by itself is bringing in thousands of people per year, none at the minimum wage. To attribute a good economy in Seattle to a minimum wage is a non-sequitur.
I find it curious though how some can think raising pay by fiat will help the poor. If this were really so why would there be a schedule to phase it in slowly over 7 instead of immediately? I think part of the reason is that it is expected for natural monetary inflation to cancel out the effect of the min wage increase. If we assume 2% target inflation from the FED then that would be a 15% reduction in buying power of the dollar, reducing the burden on businesses for the increase in wage price.
With phased-in increases we tend to see effects that are within the error of margin. Naturally if there was an overnight price increase on anything there would be immediate measurable ramifications, which is probably why the phase-ins are always slow. If people truly thought the effects were positive then they would push for the changes to be as immediate as possible to leave no room for doubt about the effect of the policy.
Meanwhile the homeless situation in Seattle is getting progressively worse. With the increase in minimum wage, some people are paid more, but at the expense of some poor people not being able to acquire a job at all. Certainly we could find a better way of handling things.
From the comments it doesn't look like many read the article. Here's the tldr:
Free software won. Yay!
However, what about hardware, infrastructure, and services?
Oops. All those things have been become increasingly centralized.
Centralization has diminished our privacy, and therefore our liberty.
Time to put restrictions on corporations so we can have liberty again.
Now the only part I disagree with is the last part. Laws and regulations got us into this mess in the first place. These companies are huge because they can sue or prevent others from competing through laws and regulations. Guess who lobbies to create these laws in the first place? (It's not the little guy) The biggest problem is Intellectual Property (IP). Because of it we have DRM and many companies have very literal monopolies (enforced by government) on things. Apple has a patent on rounded rectangles for heaven's sake.
What we need is a decentralization of power, and a turn towards distributed systems. The best way to do that will be to eliminate IP. That will take some time, but we should do it gradually. By allowing people to "copy" it will create competition and weaken the monopoly-like position many of these companies hold. Power will fragment and decentralize. That should be the goal.
Actually (counter-intuitively) college would be more affordable for middle class and the poor in a situation where there are no loans. Consider, there are only a tiny amount of rich people and there are many, many colleges. If there were no loans, colleges would have to make themselves affordable enough to get any enrollment. A large portion of tuition increases have come from bloated administration and useless degree programs. Those would disappear if people weren't given gobs of money in loans.
Though I can't recommend it, there would actually be better outcomes if we banned loans for college. Flooding the higher education market with cash has made it less affordable not more. Having people be responsible for the cost up front would make them better shoppers and the colleges more lean. Prices would come back down to reasonable levels.
It is precisely because of resource constraints that the open source model would work better. Take education for example. What if anyone could start a school with any standard for curriculum? It would instantly solve the arguments that happen over the democracy of curriculum we have today. It would also allow experimentation into redefining how education is done. We could easily see what works and what doesn't without having to change education for an entire state or the country. How many resources have we wasted following fads? How many good ideas have been skipped because they were too risky to implement universally?
There are obvious downsides as well, but history seems to show that the benefits outweigh the downsides for this type of model.
Imagine a building whose design and construction was governed by democracy. The architecture would be a horrible mish-mash of whatever happened to be popular, and likely architecturally unsound and unsafe. The actual construction would be a nightmare too, since someone would have the "brilliant" idea of painting drywall before laying it so people don't have to use unsafe ladders, ect.
Software can be millions of times more complicated than building blueprints. Why in the hell do you think democracy will work for software when it doesn't work for office buildings?
Contrast this with the way open source development generally proceeds. A single developer (or maybe a few) create a software project as the core team. They are the experts for that project. Other people can make suggestions and contribute, but it's up to the core team to decide if something meshes with the vision they have for the project.
What if someone disagrees? They can simply fork the project and try out their own vision. They are the expert of their own project.
This has some amazing consequences. First of all there can be multiple winners. Project A can be very popular, yet project B, which caters to a minority, can also exist and serve people with different needs and tastes. Second, it allows parallel experiments of multiple ideas, which encourages rapid innovation to take place. Finally, it helps minimize conflict between people, since you can join or start a project that meets your fancy without penalty.
Contrast this with democracy. In a democracy it's winner take all. Majority vote determines what everyone has to live with. This creates conflict and intense competition (including bribes and corruption) to get majority vote. It slows innovation because things can only be done one way at a time, whichever way was popular. There can be no single vision, everything becomes a huge contorted mess. It's hard enough to architect software with a single vision.
You should be doing research on how to make politics more like the (multi)governance of open source development, not the other way around!
Actually, the ethically and morally right thing to do would be to respect people's right to keep everything they earn. Good causes should prove they are good causes and be funded voluntarily. Forcing people to fund things causes conflict.
Instead of fines, the Chief Security Officer should be fully responsible and face 35 years in jail if a breach happens.
You better believe they'll care about security then.
Many companies would also rethink whether they need to track and keep personal information at all.